There is a community out there that I am part of. Sometimes I feel more a part of it and other times I feel less a part of it. I know that meeting everyone in the flesh will cement my place in the community and it makes me nervous. I feel that stepping fully into the community will open doors inside me and opening them makes me nervous, I am not ready.

But this part of the community, the bit online here, I fully belong to. I had not realised what my Teacher, Lisa was trying to create. I was always a little bemused that I could not comment on her posts because to me that was the obvious way to have a dialogue as a blogger. I didn’t get that this needed more than a few lines in a comment, because the conversation needs to take place between two peoples space and not firmly in one persons space.

I didn’t get it until Jihad took one of Lisa’s posts and took her thoughts and told his own story and it made me realise that I had completely missd the point! He took some thoughts from her and was inspired and told his own story and added his own thoughts and in turn inspired more people.

In terms of the change of outlook Jihad describes, I am not there, I am not ready, and that goes hand in hand with my nervousnes about meeting everyone. But I do know that some of my attitudes have changed. Last night we met up with some old and close friends and we were talking and I suddenly had one of those moments of realising how much my attitudes have changed, what I see as being logical and obvious is as a result of those changes within me, and they are not obvious and logical to everyone at all.

We were talking about the outrageous wages and payoff the head of our local Council is receiving as he leaves. It led to me saying how I didn’t want to have one of those sorts of jobs, to reach that high, to earn that much. One of the girls was bemused. I tried to explain that having more, having a job like that comes with obligations to spend, to have more, to get more caught up. She got a little shirty and replied the Boss of her company was very down to earth and wore jeans and t-shirts. I realised that she did not get it at all and even more tricky for me, she aspires to climb some way up that slippery slope herself. It was as if my opinions were an insult to her dreams.

After an awkward moment, we moved on.

This group of people are like family to me, we are a little tribe of eight (soon to be nine!). I moved away from my family a long time ago and while I love them dearly and wish I saw more of them, all these families I have don’t entirely get me, they are not quite like me. As a child I would look at my family and wonder how on earth they ended up with me! I seemed so different and I could not find me in them. A long time has passed and i can see how pieces of them, of my Ancestors, recombined to make me, to make something different.

My husband is also completely different to me, but on some basic level we are the same. It is our differences that make us a strong team but that basic similarity that keeps us here together as one.

I am finding that on this basic level the shamanic community I have found here in Cornwall shares some of this basic sameness. This community is perhaps a little different from my online dreaming community as many of the people there do not follow a shamanic path but are exploring shamanism to expand their own pagan paths. I don’t have a problem with this. Slowly the skills and techniques of Shamanism will spread into the local pagan communities via the people who have a foot in both communities. We need to find a way to work with this land here and the pagan peoples of this land have much of this knowledge. For me, I want this knowledge and to combine it with Shamanism. I want to know what plants that grow locally I can use for smudging for instance. KR touched on this a while back on FB when she spoke of her experiences in Hawaii.

But the people within this community who do walk a Shamanic path, I have started to feel a deeper connection to, as a Dreamer. They have started walking my dreams and sometimes we talk in them and it made me wonder why I do not dream with my online shamanic community in this way. I may dream the similar themes but they as people, do not walk my dreams with faces I recognise. I have begun to think that this physical meeting and working together is fundamentally important.

Odessa talks about her experiences finding this community and how she dreamt them before she met them. Maybe it is different for different people. Maybe I will only know I have dreamt them when I meet them. I don’t know.

All I know is I am working on it, I am learning, my Wheel is turning and someday it is going to take me to Canada, but not yet.